[rrpjr]

Rumsfeld isn't contradicting anything. Throughout his litany the terrorists are referred to in the subjective, that is, "the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul,... did the bombing in Spain, ... attacked the United States in New York, ... shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, ... cut off peoples' heads on television."

He simply reiterated, in somewhat mangled detail, that the terrorists "brought down" the plane.

As for conspiracies -- does anyone really believe that in a country in which a President of the United States cannot keep secret a sexual liaison with a lowly intern a decision as fraught as the order to shoot down a commercial aircraft, involving a chain of command, could ever be kept secret? This applies to all conspiracies. There cannot be a successful conspiracy. It is a romantic fallacy, a fundamental impossibility. The conspiracy itself is antithetical to the nature of man. Men live to talk, to monger and share their secrets; the "conspiracy" implies a quality of competence, a design of silence, far beyond the capacities of men, certainly at least of modern, waggish Americans.